Would it be better to let the prisoner die of hunger? Doesn’t sound ethical either.
I agree with Velocity. I’ve never seen how, of the choice, “Letting your patient die”, or “Forcibly feeding your patient to keep him alive”, the first is the moral thing to do. It seems to me that doctors and nurses take oaths to preserve lives, not let people throw theirs away.
An explicit order to torture would be unlawful, and must be disobeyed. As would an order to machine gun civilians, execute prisoners, etc.
The concept of an “oath” and a “superior” are arbitrary constructs. They work fine until such time as they don’t. Moreover, many people taking such an oath are not in a position, due to youth, lack of exposure or experience etc. to even be able to consider what taking such an oath actually means.
People should base their decisions on their own standards of ethical behaviour. If the nurse in this case has a moral objection then of course they should disobey the order and I’d applaud them for taking such a stand.
Would you applaud a Nazi soldier that refused a direct order to herd people into the chambers due to his moral objections?
Consider where your simplistic stance takes you. There is a direct line from blindly following orders to any number of military atrocities.
If death is the only way somebody can escape their extralegal imprisonment by a government that has had them tortured and still actively defends those torturers, why do you believe is it ethical to deny them that escape? These prisoners are not being force-fed for the sake of the patient, but to whitewash America’s crimes against them, to disguise the fact that they consider their continued imprisonment by their one-time torturers a fate worse than death.
As medical professionals, don’t nurses swear a similar oath as doctors dictating how they practice medicine?
Again I ask, what about ordering Chaplains not to give Last Rites to prisoners that will not cooperate fully with Military Intelligence, or ordering them to show favoritism to those that do?
There’s probably a reason they don’t order doctors to participate in the force-feeding. The United States does not recognize force-feeding as torture, no part of our laws do and we aren’t signatory to any treaties that recognize it as torture, so there is nothing improper in the order. Any international treaties we’ve signed up for governing military behavior are incorporated in the UCMJ and orders to violate them are unlawful, but that’s not the case here.
So yes, I don’t care what the consequences are if a member of the military is given a lawful order disobedience must be punished. This is the core of what is necessary for a military to exist.
Now that being said, I think there is a reason nurses are given these orders and not doctors. Further, nurses that probably are not licensed as nurses in any case. The military doesn’t want to make serving unattractive to physicians and give them a lot of sweetheart perks as it is. I doubt you’d see a doctor given an order like this in the military.
Yes, after being punished she will be in the private sector. It’s a criminal offense to disobey an order. It’s among the most serious in the military depending on the context (disobedience before the enemy is a capital crime.)
My personal judgment about what is torture has no place governing the behavior of the United States military. What if I’m part of a religious sect and consider forced insulin treatment (which nurse WhyNot says happens in prisons and is not against any professional guidelines, even though it seems identical in concept to forced feeding) torture? What if I’m part of a religious sect that I only joined after enlisting, a few days before being ordered to assault an enemy position, that believes touching a gun is immoral?
We have a robust UCMJ, we have lots of international treaties governing our soldier’s behavior and those treaties are incorporated in the UCMJ. An order violating those treaties or the UCMJ generally is an unlawful order. A lawful order on the other hand, must be obeyed. It doesn’t matter if the person has a personal problem with the lawful order. You have to punish people for violating them. Context matters, refusal to deploy should merit some prison time but not an immense amount. Something like this I would just see them dishonorably discharged and removed from the service. Refusing an order in battle should be punished extremely harshly, it’s one of the few things where I’d be fine with it being punished by death but more realistically we’d see a very lengthy prison term. Commanders literally used to kill people on the spot for disobeying orders and it was totally lawful. Disobeying orders is a big deal in the military and you cannot get to the point this nurse did without knowing that. You give up freedoms of choice in the military and in place of that choice on many issues is military discipline.
If you don’t like that, it’s an all-volunteer military, you should not have volunteered.
According to this site, you do need to hold a state license(in any state) to be a military nurse.
Yeah if we started letting people out of their military responsibilities on the argument that “they were too young and stupid when they signed up” we may as well close up shop tomorrow. The military isn’t a place for moral objections or “your own standards of ethical behavior.” You guys really don’t get that the military is a place where you lose a lot of your civilian rights, do you?
We as a society have decided when personal ethics can overrule an order, we have not and should not give individual soldiers carte blanche to impose their own ethical system into it. Again, if you want to do that you need to not volunteer in the first place. Barring that you can do what this person did–and you will pay the consequences.
Do we know what her actual MOS is?
Not yet. What do you think she should do if she is ordered to do something that would cause her to lose her state license? The dilemma is that if she loses her state license, she no longer qualifies to be a military nurse.
So you actually approve of soldiers obeying orders to round people up into concentration camps or torture them?
Hardly, this has nothing to do with “rights” - this entire situation exists because of the government denying that rights exist.
However, we are aware of the principle that saying “I was just following orders” is no excuse for barbaric behavior; it’s an outright cliche at this point.
Well, here’s the thing. Regardless of how unlawful the order might be, you don’t get to just decide to not obey without consequences. If this nurse feels her orders are illegal, she can disobey them and then face the consequences at a Court Martial. She might be exonerated or she might not be. But the ultimate decision of whether the order is legal or not isn’t hers to make.
The law is beside the point; we’ve long since decided the law doesn’t matter in this entire affair. We created the entire “unlawful combatant” category and stuck our victims it Guantanamo specifically so we could put our victims and everyone involved with them in a legal limbo. It’s silly to pretend that now, suddenly the law matters when it didn’t when we grabbed these people, it didn’t when we tortured them, and it still doesn’t when we continue to hold them there without charges.
The law has no moral force, here; not after what we’ve already done and are still doing. She is under no moral obligation to obey it at this point. What matters is doing the right thing morally, and the practical issue of if she can she get away with it.
Cool story, bro.
What an incredibly meaningless non-reply. Why didn’t you just type “bloorg” or “glarp” instead?
HE! HE! Please, not all nurses are women! This one, in fact, is a man. Jeesh.
Neither the Hippocratic Oath nor the Florence Nightingale Pledge are legally binding. But yes, we often do, as part of our “pinning” ceremony around graduation. Here’s what it says:
I didn’t say it when my classmates did, because it was about 100 years out of date to my mind. Not to mention logically indefensible with current medical practices. It has the same problem “do no harm” does, namely that modern medicine mandates that we do quite a bit of harm sometimes, in the hope that more healing comes from it. Chemo? Harm. Radiation? Harm. Surgery? Harm.
And don’t get me started on “purity”. Sexist bullshit.
No, it probably has a lot more to do with the fact that doctors and nurses do different things, and you will rarely find a doctor trained in the administration of NG tubes and tube feedings. Many of them know how to do it in theory (because it’s not hard), but they don’t do it, because nurses do. It would be like going to your Tax Attorney to fill out your Schedule C. She probably knows how to do it, because she knows the theory, the legal ramifications and the general anatomy of a tax form. But it would be weird and inefficient and more likely to result in errors. A much better idea would be to ask a Tax Accountant to do it. Tax Attorneys and Tax Accountants may sometimes work together, and what they do may not be very distinguishable to a layperson, but they are separate fields working in tandem.
Much more important to me than the AMA’s stance, although I realize with a heavy sigh that they have more weight with the general public…but the American *Nurses *Association is standing behind this guy.* Our state Nurse Practice Acts are largely silent on specific procedures, but they do instruct us to follow our professional education that we received in an approved nursing education program (mine said “you can’t force feed an unwilling competent patient”) and the guidance of the professional organizations of our field (one of which would be the ANA, which says this nurse is doing the right thing.)
*And even that article ends with a quote from a doctor, not a nurse. Ugh.